It looks like Windows 10 is shaping up to be the ultimate dream for gamers. Supposedly, the DirectX 12 implementation in Windows 10 will boost the performance of current graphics cards in a major way. According to the latest benchmarks run by Anandtech on a beta version of Windows 10, phenomenal scores were attained with both AMD and NVIDIA GPUs.

The AMD video cards saw the largest performance gain with a boost of up to 400% in many benchmarks. The NVIDIA GPUs saw a more modest, yet still impressive 150% gain in performance. To put things in perspective, the NVIDIA GPU used was the GTX 980, which uses NVIDIA's current generation Maxwell architecture which is a generation ahead of AMD's offering. In the Oxide Games' "Star Swarm" Tech Demo, the GTX 980 scored a boost from 26.7fps to 66.8fps going from DirectX 11 to DirectX 12. In the same tech demo on the AMD Radeon R9 290X, the score jumped from a paltry 8.3fps in DirectX 11 to a decent 49.2fps DirectX 12.

As you can see, just because the AMD chip scored the biggest increase, that doesn't mean it scored the best of the two GPUs. Ultimately, NVIDIA's tech is just a bit ahead of AMD's on the video card front when it comes to DirectX 12. More than likely, by the time we see Windows 10, AMD will have released their next generation architecture which might make up that performance deficit.

Either way, this is fantastic news for gamers, and could bode well for the Xbox One if Microsoft can implement DirectX 12 seamlessly into the system.

Intel recently demoed DirectX 12, and the chip-maker claims that it will significantly increase performance, power efficiency, scalability, and portability.

After instructing the benchmarking software to use DirectX 12, the system began to perform better in two significant ways: improved distribution of work between threads, and a huge decrease in CPU use. Also, the Direct3D 12 driver used about 50 percent less power.

Results are preliminary and may vary significantly from the final version.